Sam West: The Museum of Failure

摘要

I am a clinical psychologist by training, and I practiced for about 10 years. After some work with corporate groups, I decided to get a PhD in organizational psychology. My PhD thesis was about how a playful work environment facilitates organizational creativity. I found that when people can have a playful approach to their work tasks, they are more creative. My work in creativity got me thinking about why innovation fails and how we can learn from that failure. It is well known that it takes courage to admit to failure in many organizations, but what is interesting from a psychological perspective is that the fear of failure is not so much the fear of the concrete consequence, it's the fear of the social consequences-the embarrassment, the loss of prestige, and so on. So there is a fear of failure, but how can you be innovative if you don't allow yourself to fail? While contemplating this, I came up with the idea for the Museum of Failure.